Like countless other children around the world, Jerry Firlan was starstruck on December 24, 1968. It was not because he caught Santa Claus coming down the chimney with a new bike. Instead, space exploration had grasped the world’s attention that Christmas Eve. Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were orbiting the moon, broadcasting live to roughly a quarter of the world’s population.
“I was 12 and watched it from our living room TV while we were decorating our tree,” Firlan, a video editor and lifelong space enthusiast in Ocean Township, New Jersey, tells Popular Science. “It was amazing to us that humans were orbiting the moon. The live TV transmission, though very low-definition by today’s standards, was fascinating, mesmerizing, and beautiful. Nobody in the house talked at all during the whole transmission.”
The broadcast and orbits would go on to be a milestone in both media and space history. At the time, it was the most watched television broadcast in history. According to Borman, the crew was told that they would have “the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice”. NASA simply instructed the astronauts to say something appropriate. As they beamed back images of the moon and Earth, the astronauts took turns reading from the book of Genesis.
“The first ten verses of Genesis is the foundation of many of the world’s religions, not just the Christian religion,” Lovell recalled in 2008. “There are more people in other religions than the Christian religion around the world, and so this would be appropriate to that and so that’s how it came to pass.”
That same Christmas Eve, Anders snapped the famous Earthrise photo showing what our home looks like from the moon’s orbit.
Apollo 8 launched from Cape Kennedy Air Force Station in Florida on December 21, 1968. It was the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth’s gravitational sphere of influence and also the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon.
The crew also made it to their Christmas Eve destination due to a “bold, improvisational call by NASA.” Continued delays with the lunar module were threatening to slow down the entire Apollo program. NASA pivoted and sent the Apollo 8 crew all the way to the moon without a lunar module on the first manned flight of the massive Saturn V rocket. This accelerated timeline ended up keeping President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a human on the surface of the moon by the end of the 1960s alive.
It took 68 hours for the spacecraft to reach the moon. The crew then orbited 10 times over about 20 hours, during which they made the famous Christmas Eve broadcast.
The next morning, mission control waited for confirmation that Apollo 8’s engine burn to leave lunar orbit was successful. Lovell radioed back “Roger, please be informed there is a Santa Claus,” and the crew began the journey home.
Apollo 8 splashed down in the northern Pacific Ocean on December 27 after a total mission time of 6 days, 3 hours, 42 seconds. Upon their return, Time magazine named Borman, Lovell, and Anders their Men of the Year for 1968.
[ Related: Happy holidays from space! ]
This successful mission ultimately paved the way for Apollo 11, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon. The lunar landing was watched by an estimated 650 million people on television, but that awestruck communal viewing owed a bit of gratitude to Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve message.
“The fact that it was on Christmas Eve added to the wonder of the event,” says Firlan. “It’s one of those memories that has stuck with me all these years.”
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